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Apple wins $120 million in patent lawsuit against Samsung

By Paul EliasThe Associated Press

Fri., May 2, 2014

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Samsung was ordered Friday to pay Apple $119.46 million (U.S.) after a Silicon Valley jury found the South Korean company guilty of copying key features of the iPhone in creating its own line of smartphones.

The verdict was a far cry from the $2.2 billion sought by Apple and the $930 million it won in a separate 2012 trial making similar patent infringement claims against older Samsung products, most of which are no longer for sale in the United States.

This combo picture shows Samsung's Galaxy S II, left, and Apple's iPhone 4S, right, in Tokyo. Jurors in San Jose ordered Samsung Friday to pay just a fraction of the big-money damages sought by Apple in a high-stakes Silicon Valley case over smartphone patents. A jury in federal court in California found that Samsung violated some patents and ruled that the South Korean consumer electronics giant should pay $119.6 million in damages. (YOSHIKAZU TSUNO / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

The jury even put a damper on the current verdict by also finding that Apple had infringed one of Samsung’s patents in creating the iPhone 4 and 5. The jury awarded Samsung $158,400, skimming that amount from the original $119.62-million verdict. Samsung had sought $6 million.

“Though this verdict is large by normal standards, it is hard to view this outcome as much of a victory for Apple,” said Brian Love, a Santa Clara University law professor. “This amount is less than 10 per cent of the amount Apple requested and probably doesn’t surpass by too much the amount Apple spent litigating this case.”

Unlike the first trial in San Jose federal court in 2012, Samsung lawyers made Google a central focus of their defence. Google makes the Android software that Samsung and other smartphone manufacturers use as their operating systems. Samsung argued that Google was Apple’s real target.

More than 70 per cent of smartphones run on Android, a mobile operating system that Google Inc. has given out free to Samsung and other phone makers.

Both companies will now try to urge the judge to remove the others products from store shelves in the United States. Love and other experts say that neither company is expected to succeed with those demands.

“So far Apple has been unsuccessful at doing so and, without a sales ban, this case is unlikely to move the needle on the larger battle between Apple and Android,” Love said.

The verdict marked the latest intellectual property battle between the world’s top two smartphone makers. Apple and Samsung have sued each other in courts and trade offices around the world.

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Apple and Samsung are locked in a bitter struggle for dominance of the $330 billion worldwide smartphone market. Samsung has become the leader of the sector with a 31 per cent share after being an also-ran with just 5 per cent in 2007. Apple, meanwhile, has seen its market share slip to about 15 per cent from a high of 27 per cent three years ago.

The jury of four men and four women delivered its verdict in the latest case after beginning deliberations on April 29.

During the month-long trial, Apple argued that many of the key functions and vital features of Samsung phones were invented by Apple. Samsung countered that its phones operate on the Google Android software system and that any legal complaint Apple has is with the search giant.

Google entered the smartphone market while its then-CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board. The move infuriated Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who considered Android to be a blatant ripoff of iPhone innovations.

After removing Schmidt from Apple’s board, Jobs vowed that Apple would resort to “thermonuclear war” to destroy Android and its allies. At the recent trial, Samsung attorneys produced an email Jobs sent to executives in 2010 urging them to wage a “holy war” against Android in 2011.

Early in deliberations, the jury wanted to know if Jobs had mentioned Google when considering the lawsuit that was eventually filed in 2012, several months after the Apple founder died of cancer.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh told jurors that no additional evidence was available to them beyond what was presented during the trial.

Koh answered similarly to questions about Samsung’s chief executive officer’s reaction when informed that Apple executives had complained to executives at the South Korean company about alleged patent infringement.

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